In brief: The Steam hardware and software survey for July has arrived. Last month was a good one for AMD, Ampere, and, yet again, Windows 7. But while AMD is making up some of the ground it lost to Intel, there's still no sign of the Radeon RX 6000 series among survey participants, despite the first cards arriving over eight months ago.

Having chipped away at Intel's CPU lead since December and finally passing the 30% mark in May, AMD experienced a surprise decline in June, dropping to 28.41%. As predicted, it appears this was only a temporary blip: Team red rebounded with a share increase of 0.78% to hit 29.19% last month. More than seven out of ten people still use Intel CPUs, but AMD is back to putting pressure on its rival.

Looking to graphics cards, just two of the top five entries saw gains last month, and they were only minor 0.01% increases for the GTX 1650 and GTX 1050. Despite the GTX 1060's -0.71% fall, the Pascal card keeps the number one spot it has enjoyed since replacing the GTX 750 Ti way back in December 2017. It appears that more users of these older cards are replacing them with newer models---where available.

It was a great month for Nvidia's latest and greatest, with every Ampere card on the list experiencing an uptick in users. The RTX 3060 Laptop GPU saw the biggest increase in July (0.15%), with the RTX 3060 jumped 0.13% and its Ti variant was up 0.05%. The RTX 3070 increased 0.06% (laptop version up 0.04%), the RTX 3080 was up 0.04%, and even the RTX 3090 saw a 0.03% gain, despite Amazon's New World beta killing some of the flagships.

Still missing from the survey's GPU section is the Radeon RX 6000 lineup. The first in the series, the Radeon RX 6800 and Radeon RX 6800 XT released in November last year, but not a single participant has an RNDA 2 card. Their availability issues have been worse than most, admittedly, though AMD hopes the problems won't be as bad with the Radeon RX 6600 XT launch on August 11---don't hold your breath on that one. (Update: while no Radeon RX 6000 cards appear in the 'all Video Cards' section,' they are in the 'Vulkan Systems' category. AMD's cards make up just 0.34% of the entire share).

With the Windows 11 beta now available (to Windows Insiders) and Windows 7 extended support period finishing in January 2020, one might expect the aging OS to have almost died off, but no: Windows 7 64-bit users increased 2.91% in June and 3.51% in July. Last month also saw Linux systems reach 1% for the first time in years.

We also saw the Oculus Quest 2 cement its position as the top VR headset last month. It now has a 31.07% share, almost double that of the second-place Oculus Rift S. The Quest is unlikely to see big gains in August as Oculus owner Facebook has temporarily suspended sales over skin irritation reports.